Driving With Dead People (28 page)

“Thanks for coming,” I said. “After what I did, you shouldn’t even be talking to me.”

“I’ll always talk to you,” he said, and then he locked up JoAnn’s belongings and walked me back down the empty hallway.

I followed him as we both drove north. When I saw him take the exit for Connecticut, I felt another lump in my throat. I’d backed the wrong horse. My family was nowhere to be found, but Daniel was right there. I thought,
If he and I were together, it would be incredibly comforting.

When I got to my apartment in Brooklyn, I needed to talk to a friend, so I called Julie Kilner for the first time in a year. She had a new baby boy and sounded happy, still living in Ohio. I didn’t tell her what was happening to my family.

“Are you going to Florida to visit your dad this summer?” she asked.

“No,” I said quickly. He must have been on vacation. It was the first news I’d had of him since Christmas.

“Then maybe you can come out and stay with all of us in Ohio,” she suggested.

“I’d love to, believe me, but I can’t leave work.”

We talked a little more and then hung up. Dad was in Florida.

The following weekend, JoAnn and I met with a heavyset blond psychologist at the psych ward.

The doctor asked me, “What do you think about all of this coming to light?”

“I’m in shock,” I replied.

“Still?” she asked.

“Is there a moratorium on being in shock?” I asked.

“Of course not,” she replied.

“I’m shocked that JoAnn’s in a mental hospital,” I said. “I can’t believe this is happening to my family.”

“This was a surprise?” she asked.

“Yes,” I reiterated.

“In families where this level of sexual abuse has taken place, it’s not unusual for children to repress it,” she said. I wasn’t sure if she was talking about JoAnn or me.

“I don’t remember the level of abuse that JoAnn remembers,” I explained. “Being the youngest, maybe I missed the worst of it,” I said.

“But you two slept in the same bedroom until JoAnn was fifteen, correct?” she asked.

“Correct,” I said, my stomach flipping over.

“And what about your mom?” she asked.

“I don’t think she was involved, was she?” I turned to JoAnn.

The doctor interrupted. “Long-term sexual abuse cannot take place unless everyone in the house is following the same dynamic. It’s the family dynamic that allows something this horrific and violent to occur—especially over a long period of time,” she said.

“A father abuses his daughter and the mother gets blamed!” I said, incensed.

“No, I’m saying that if your mother had been a different person, the abuse could not possibly have gotten to the level it did,” she said. “I know your father’s a major piece in all of this, but I would suggest that when you start looking at your mother, whom you actually trusted to keep you safe when you were young children, that’s going to be the worst piece. The place you’ll feel the most betrayed.”

“But I don’t remember anything specific. I don’t think this happened to me,” I insisted.

“The entire family sets the scene, and there is an unspoken agreement to ignore and forget. You might not remember, but you sure felt the effects of what went on in that house. You had to have been influenced whether you were actually molested or not.”

Actually molested? In my sorrow and rage for JoAnn, I’d stopped wondering if I might have my own experiences locked away. Staring at the psychologist, who was talking to JoAnn, I began to wonder,
If Dad came to her in the bedroom, and Becky and I were also there, did we see anything? Was it realistic to think that he left us alone?
Or was this psychologist messing with my head? Maybe this had nothing to do with me. Maybe it
was
just JoAnn.

“Monica, is there any way I can help you before we end the session?” she asked.

“Only if you can make this go away,” I said. “Get me out of this nightmare.”

I walked out of the psych ward angry, defeated, and exhausted. It was dark and starting to sprinkle. I climbed into my Honda hatchback and turned the key. I didn’t know my family. Everything I’d believed to be true was washing away with the rain.

I looked at the building where JoAnn was locked up. No one walking by would suspect the horror that was being exposed in such a benign-looking place—an office building, really. I hated leaving her, but now there was no other place to take her. There was only an empty apartment, and after tomorrow, she wouldn’t even have that.

I tilted my head back onto the headrest, and thought about Mom. I missed her. I missed my mom coming to take care of everything. The thing is, she never had taken care of things. That was never my mom. But I longed for her anyway.

I squeezed my eyes shut and thought of a sweet moment between the two of us.

I was six years old, and we were sitting in the nubby orange chair in the living room. I was nestled into her lap, and her breath smelled like Wrigley’s spearmint gum. As she held the green book open in front of us, it seemed like no one else was in the house, but the other kids must have been there. Mom began reading from
Now We Are Six.

I opened my eyes—even a Winnie-the-Pooh story furthered the illusion that there was someone protecting me. As Mom read to me night after night, I believed the fairy tales. Why wouldn’t I?
She
believed them.

It was really raining now. I started the car and headed to the Lucky Seven liquor store. I bought Bacardi rum and a six-pack of Pepsi and drove to the apartment. Tomorrow, I would need to clean it so JoAnn could get her deposit back. Tonight, I needed to drink.

I was eager to obliterate reality. Maybe that’s the one thing Jamie was missing—the ability to deny—and that’s why he drank. He didn’t have the protection of denial, so he had to escape another way. Tonight, three thousand miles away from my brother, I would join him for a drink, understanding his alcoholism for the first time.

When I got to the apartment, I was hungry and scared. I called Mom. I’d just paid JoAnn’s car payment, so I was also broke. I knew better than to call her, but I was still hoping for a crumb of comfort and understanding. I wasn’t ready to give up on her just yet.

“Hi, Mom,” I said.

“Hello to you,” she said.

“I’ve been with JoAnn at the psych ward—,” I started to say, when she interrupted.

“Could we not get into that tonight? I’ve had a terrible day, and I don’t want to talk about it.”

“But I need to talk,” I explained.

“Call Daniel,” she said.

“I don’t want to call Daniel. I want to talk to you,” I said.

“Then we’re not talking about JoAnn.” She was silent.

“You don’t even know what she looks like. She’s tiny, maybe a hundred pounds. She has cuts running the length of her arms,” I said. “I’m in a nightmare out here.”

“Well, a gold star for you. But you aren’t the only one hurting,” she said bitterly.

“I didn’t say I was the only one hurting, but I’m the only one
here
,” I said. “JoAnn doesn’t want to live. She’s under suicide watch.”

“Jim and I are taking a short vacation,” she announced.

“A vacation?” I exclaimed.

“I need to get away, so Jim’s taking me to Michigan for a few days,” she said.

“Mom, we need money. I can’t support JoAnn and me on my salary. I have to drive four hours back to Brooklyn on Sunday night just so I can work all week and come back down here. How could you go on vacation? Send that money to JoAnn; she needs it,” I urged. “I’m afraid she’s going to kill herself as it is. If she loses her car, her situation will become even more hopeless. I’ve already emptied her apartment into a storage facility.”

Mom was furious. “You will not tell me what I need and do not need. I’m going to Michigan and I’m going to get away from all of this,” she said, and hung up the phone.

I opened the Bacardi.

The next morning I forced myself awake, with a pounding hangover and a sore back from sleeping on the floor. I needed Mom to prove the psychologist wrong, but she was doing the opposite. I needed her to come through, but she was leaving for Michigan, probably had already left. And to make it worse, Michigan was
my
haven, where
my
friends gathered and performed shows and swam. It was the place I was the happiest. And what I wouldn’t have given to go there myself.

I was beginning to wonder if my relationship with Mom would survive this mess. In books and in music, people talk about always loving your mother. What I was feeling toward her was nothing like love.

I scrubbed JoAnn’s apartment clean and dropped the keys off at the management office in her complex.

Visiting JoAnn, I saw the blond psychologist in the hallway.

“How are you holding up?” she asked.

“I’d like to not become a patient here myself, if I can help it,” I said.

“Are you afraid you’ll end up here?”

“I had a terrible dream last night,” I said.

“Come on in,” she said, opening the door to her office. “Tell me about it.”

I sat down in the chair across from her desk and tried to remember every detail.

In my dream, Mom, Becky, Jamie, JoAnn, Dad, and I were sitting in a pew at the Galesburg Methodist Church.

My head was bowed for a prayer when I heard a sound, muffled and steady, like someone thumping their hand on the top of a wooden bench. It was coming from the back of the church. I looked at the people in front of me, but no one else had seemed to notice. The noise was louder now. I slid my hand across the seat of the pew to discover what I already knew; my father was no longer sitting there. I turned my head slightly to my right: JoAnn was missing as well.

The pastor was droning on about tithing as I stood and turned slowly to my left. My father was in the very back of the sanctuary, holding my sister down by the back of her neck. Her yellow Sunday school dress with the big bow in the back was hiked up over her head and he was raping her from behind, each thrust sending her small head knocking into the back of the last pew—
bang, bang, bang
.

In the congregation, people started shifting in their seats. Women in small pastel pillbox hats were looking at their laps. Everyone knew what was happening, but no one turned around or made a move to rescue JoAnn.

I stood up and hurried out to the carpeted aisle beside our pew. I held out my arms as far as they would reach and began turning, around and around and around. As I turned, the sun moved backward across the window and the Reverend Morse walked in reverse away from the pulpit and back up the aisle. I was turning back time with everything a desperate child could muster—with all the strength in the universe. And it was working. I spun until JoAnn, Dad, and I were once again sitting in the pew.

I grabbed JoAnn’s hand and ran out the back of the church. She was slower than I was, but I pulled her along behind me. We ran down the street and around the corner to Mammaw’s house. I shoved JoAnn through the front door and up the steps to the second floor, where no one ever went and where Mammaw kept upcoming Christmas and birthday gifts piled in corners and on desks.

I pushed JoAnn onto a double bed and grabbed the quilt off a nearby rocker. I covered her in the quilt, tucking in all three sides so tight that no one could get to her. I was sobbing and sitting next to her with my hand on her heaving chest. I watched her for hours until a miracle occurred and she slept. It was starting to get dark. The whole day had gone by. We were alone on this bed, in this dark house, and I was her only protector.

I looked at the painting above the bed, where ballet dancers pirouetted across the middle of a green background, when suddenly the colors started swirling and changing. I stared at the painting. I knew that it was telling me how to protect JoAnn, but I couldn’t decipher the message. I looked at her sleeping face and understood that the answers were being offered through this painting, but I was too numb or stupid to understand them.